thither multitudes
flocked afresh and there, in each case, it rose to its height again and
went, with all its vivacity and good faith, through all its motions.

These latter were to leave me, however, with a fonder vision still than
that of the comparatively jejune "lecture-room" version; for the first
exhibition of them to spring to the front was the fine free rendering
achieved at a playhouse till then ignored by fashion and culture, the
National Theatre, deep down on the East side, whence echoes had come
faintest to ears polite, but where a sincerity vivid though rude was now
supposed to reward the curious. Our numerous attendance there under this
spell was my first experience of the "theatre party" as we have enjoyed
it in our time--each emotion and impression of which is as fresh to me
as the most recent of the same family. Precious through all indeed
perhaps is the sense, strange only to later sophistication, of my small
encouraged state as a free playgoer--a state doubly wondrous while I
thus evoke the full contingent from Union Square; where, for that
matter, I think, the wild evening must have been planned. I am lost
again in all the goodnature from which small boys, on wild evenings,
could dangle so unchidden--since the state of unchiddenness is what
comes back to me well-nigh clearest. How without that complacency of
conscience could every felt impression so live again? It is true that
for my present sense of the matter snubs and raps would still tingle,
would count double; just wherefore it is exactly, however, that I mirror
myself in these depths of propriety. The social scheme, as we knew it,
was, in its careless charity, worthy of the golden age--though I can't
sufficiently repeat that we knew it both at its easiest and its safest:
the fruits dropped right upon the board to which we flocked together,
the least of us and the greatest, with differences of appetite and of
reach, doubtless, but not with differences of place and of proportionate
share. My appetite and my reach in respect to the more full-bodied Uncle
Tom might have brooked certainly any comparison; I must have partaken
thoroughly of the feast to have left the various aftertastes so separate
and so strong. It was a great thing to have a canon to judge by--it
helped conscious criticism, which was to fit on wings (for use ever
after) to the shoulders of appreciation. In the light of that advantage
I could be _sure_ my second Eliza was less dramat